AfterCollege, Inc. has created a unique Internet recruiting service that greatly facilitates employers' efforts to recruit university graduates and students. It does this by establishing highly targeted recruiting relationships with individual academic departments, as well as academic groups, and professional group chapters, allowing AfterCollege to gather information about, and providing access to, graduating college students who are entering the job market. AfterCollege is using these unique relationships to provide a set of recruiting services to employers that cannot easily be matched by other recruiting services.
In interviews with employers, AfterCollege discovered that the number one need of companies in recruiting entry-level talent is the ability to specifically target the right candidates. Since efficient recruiting is becoming increasingly vital in a time-compressed work environment, employers want to streamline their efforts by targeting only the most qualified individuals. Currently, employers utilize a variety of techniques to recruit college candidates. These include advertising in school newspapers, posting jobs at university career centers, listing jobs on Internet sites, participating in industry career fairs, hosting their own events at targeted schools and establishing special “corporate affiliate” ties with individual academic departments.
Many of these recruiting strategies are not effective in reaching the most qualified candidates. As a consequence, employers are bombarded with resumes, only a few of which match the jobs. Those techniques that are more targeted tend to be expensive. Large companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars visiting campuses nationwide with the hope of attracting highly sought candidates. Often, these on-campus events suffer from low student attendance and/or attendance by unqualified candidates.
Approximately 5 million entry-level graduates and recent graduates pursue a new job each year. Online career services, however, currently contain approximately 750,000 resumes of entry-level job seekers combined (many of them duplicate among different sites), a market penetration of approximately 15%. Furthermore, university career centers, which are dedicated to helping students find employment, only account for 16% of students finding jobs.